Maybe things aren’t quite so bad in Russia as I thought. As soon as I saw the story about a Russian journalist who burst on to a live state TV news programme to protest against the war in Ukraine, I thought, well that’s her off to Siberia for the next 20 years. But instead, the journalist, the (misogyny alert) stunningly beautiful Marina Ovsyannikova has been to court and been fined £214, which I think translates to around £50million ruble if my arithmetic is correct. I reckon that’s less than what would happen in Bristol if someone appeared behind David Garmston on Points West protesting about the cost of bus fares. Some good news at last, I suppose, always assuming Ms Ovsyannikova can afford the fine. I can’t think of anything else that’s good in the world at the moment.
My amusement at this story soon turned to anger when I read on the Kyiv Independent website that 97 children have been killed since Vladimir Putin began his murderous war on Ukraine (and not Croatia, as Diane Abbott called it). Every day I wake up and think, well, Putin couldn’t do anything worse today than he did yesterday, but he always proves me wrong. Murdering pregnant women as well as their unborn offspring.
Putin pretends that there is some kind of moral mission to his invasion. He’s coming to save the Ukrainian people who have suffered enough with democracy and freedom. What they really, really want is to be ruled by a fascist maniac who will happily kill babies if it means he can get the job done. For Ms Ovsyannikova, it was too much and she hijacked the TV show with her hand made banner which proclaimed, “No war, stop the war, don’t believe the propaganda, they are lying to you here.”
Whether this will have any meaningful effect on Russian opinion is anyone’s business. As things stand, the only information the people get is government approved. Although much of our own media is approved by the government – think of The Sun, Mail, Express, Times, Telegraph, (K)GB News – we still have an element of freedom. My reach on this blog is something like eight billion. It’s just a shame that slightly less than eight million people read it. The point is that they can if they have nothing better to do. What a shame they have.
Despite the light nature of this blog, I don’t really feel that way about what’s happening in Ukraine. Seeing babies and children being bombed to death, seeing people carrying their cats and dogs to safety and knowing that many more people in Ukraine are going to die the most awful deaths. How could that make anyone feel good, unless you were a maniac. And I mean you, Putin.
You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone, sang Joni Mitchell in her tune Big Yellow Taxi. So we shouldn’t take for granted the freedoms we still have in Britain. I don’t like the way things are going under Boris Johnson’s increasingly hard line right wing government, in which his home secretary Priti ‘Pritler’ Patel wants to ban us from doing virtually anything.
Well done, Marina. You’re incredibly brave. We need more people like you.
